


A Dream Deferred

by Elywyngirlie



Category: Harry Potter - J. K. Rowling
Genre: Dark Magic, Dubious Consent, F/M, Fix It Gone Wrong, Ghosts, Hauntings, Horcruxes, Magic that does what I wanat it to do, Manipulation, Murder, Rise of Voldemort, Time Travel, Time Turner (Harry Potter), Torture, Violence, dubcon
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2020-08-15
Updated: 2020-08-15
Packaged: 2021-03-06 02:28:13
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Major Character Death
Chapters: 1
Words: 3,528
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/25915861
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Elywyngirlie/pseuds/Elywyngirlie
Summary: Magic is nothing more than desire made real and his desire keeps her with him forever.
Relationships: Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle, Hermione Granger/Tom Riddle | Voldemort
Comments: 8
Kudos: 62





	A Dream Deferred

**Author's Note:**

> Title from the Poem "Harlem" by Langston Hughes 
> 
> What happens to a dream deferred?
> 
> Does it dry up  
> like a raisin in the sun?  
> Or fester like a sore—  
> And then run?  
> Does it stink like rotten meat?  
> Or crust and sugar over—  
> like a syrupy sweet?
> 
> Maybe it just sags  
> like a heavy load.
> 
> _Or does it explode?_
> 
> Thanks to Bee for beta'ing! Any other errors are my own.

Magic is nothing more than desire made real, and his desire cements her feet to the ground. Even as she strains for the glowing light overhead, it closes with a silent zip that smothers any joy and she knows it might not open again. Her escape portal shut off and shuttered. Her last shred of hope flickers away on the breeze, that same gentle zephyr that threads its way through her particles, nearly threatening to destroy the delicate weaving that keeps her stitched together. 

A time-traipsing witch who tripped deliciously into his trap, her whispers of the future enchanting him so that she became nothing more than another prey in an overly complicated plot hatched by an acne chin splattered, adolescent Lord Voldemort. 

“How could you?” Her outrage tears through the forest and sends birds squawking into the twilight sky. Tom Riddle Jr, prefect of Slytherin house, he of the most vainglorious fashion, lifts a willowy hand to his lips and gives her an order:

“Sssh. Silence.” 

Hermione Granger, prefect of Gryffindor house, she of the thwarted plans, a splintered time turner and a lioness mane, growls at him. 

“We don’t want to wake the centaurs, now do we?” he admonishes as he rises, lithe muscles coiling in his thighs. Muscles that had thrown her for a loop upon the day of her arrival--she hadn’t expected a boy from the orphanage to have such a powerful form. She expected waifishness, a thinness that crabs along his ribs. Instead, there is a cruel mien and a power that ripples with every stride and magic that crackles alive in his very presence. 

Magic is nothing more than desire made real and Tom Riddle is nothing but his mother’s desire given form. A perfect melding of magic and hope and desire with a wisp of vengeance tucked into the corner of those coral colored lips. The seething hatred was a gift from his father made full, and final by mistreatment at an orphanage that saw children as sin walking, empty vessels to be molded and punished and shoved into another meat factory to pad corporate coffers. Dreams denied and broken before they could truly blossom in the sun. 

“I actually don’t mind waking the centaurs,” she replies sharply. 

“Miss me so much that you want me to join you already?”

“I hope they torture you.” Her hisses so sibilant that he can’t stop the tart reply in parselmouth that has gnashing her teeth and tugging that wayward front curl around her finger--a reminder of his own twirling last night as they snuggled down into the couch in front of a cracking Slytherin fire, his words promises and entreaties that hit deep into her desire for exploring magic’s depths. 

That eagerly exploited lust that had her trekking into the Forbidden Forest with him, hiding beneath the dappled spots of liquid sunshine, the cool biting at their ankles as Riddle led them to the center of the labyrinth. A clean clearing, moss clinging to rocks, ragged edges from newborn saplings daring to the encroach on the area he had made most useful for magic. 

“It was an accident, darling. It was meant to maximize your power. I didn’t realize--”

She sneers, a monstrous expression full of loathing that somehow fits her prim features. 

“I’m not your darling.”

“That’s not what you said last night.”

If she could inhale, she would, lungs full up with anger to blast him, her wand surely pointing at the pulse point in his throat. But she is insubstantial now and as she rants at him, accusing him of barely even knowing what truth is, he binds her to him. A subtle spinning, a dark thread, silken and sinuous, wrapping around her core and tying it directly to whatever is left of his heart after Myrtle Warren’s ungrateful sacrifice. 

But Hermione’s is more potent, shimmering in the air, sparking against his magic. As it always had, fireworks snapping in the lounge as he planted kisses along her rail thin spine, tongue tracing trails of old curses carved into pale flesh. Fire filled her to the brim, fire now his to control, to warp, and to weave. 

“Of course, I know the truth, Hermione. I couldn’t spin a lie if I couldn’t first discern the truth.” Hard words from hardening lips. Her body slumps on the ground and already beetles began their climb over her, boring into cream cooled skin looking for a hint of warmth in which to lay their eggs. Her hair tumbles along the ground, a tendril of green peeking through tumultuous curls and something like a feeling lurches in his chest. A fly lands on wide open eyes and Hermione protests. It’s nothing for him, magic leaping from his fingers to manifest this selfish desire.

Her form preserved, a crystalline coating, and her body sinks into the ground, soil swallowing her up as if she had never been there. Hermione pauses and toes the dirt, even as her intangible presence is pointedly ignored by soil refusing to shift.

“Why?”

But Tom doesn’t answer her. He only responds to important inquiries and this strikes him as petulant, churlish, a wayward woman seeking some sort of approval. He tilts his head, dark eyes exuberant in the last kiss of light. 

“You never struck me as foolish, darling. Naive perhaps,” he muses as he turns away, striking a path directly back to the castle. Hermione orders herself to remain but she is tugged along after him, ghostly feet pattering and slipping on leaves that don’t recognize her tread, words spluttering forth that can only be heard by him. His own private haunting. He rather likes the idea, he supposes, and wonders if that increases his ranking on a perverse scale. 

He only dwells on his psychopathy when he has nothing else to occupy his mind. 

“It was an accident, you know,” he says, quite churlish himself. Hermione glowers, hands planted on her hips, forever trapped in the half-hitched Hogwarts skirt. 

“It doesn’t matter at this point, does it.” But it's not a question, and he doesn’t deign a response as he slips through the shadowed corridor and snuggles into his bed, somewhat aware of Hermione looming over him, pale fingers struggling to grasp the wood. Spectral fingerprints leave no trace on the sturdy oak nor the silky quilt as she scrabbles at it, desperate to fling it off and torment the snoring teen, a slight uptick in the burr in his throat as he falls deeper into dreams. 

It’s how she learns that she has a bit of a leeway when his consciousness is delved into itself, the leash loosened so that she wanders the halls. She peers over students’ shoulders as they hurriedly finish an essay due in the morning. The Bloody Baron stares at her before floating away, huffing and muttering, as if a ghost could perform such a real act rather than a gesture toward it, an aping of humanity that Hermione feels less a desire for as time goes on. 

The only ghost who acknowledges her is the Grey Lady who mourns her youth.

“So much courage and wit!” she sighs as she trails down the hall toward Ravenclaw Tower, Hermione fast at her heels. But she has a form that Hermione lacks; the ghosts are able to touch one another, she notices. But not her. She merely exists, stuck in some plane, the perfectly designed pleasure possession of one Tom Riddle.

She mourns the bump of the stairway on the third floor corridor, hand brushing where the grainy stone should have marked her, as it had for years in future and past. There is no comfort to be found as she cannot even feel herself. She glowers at Tom as he casually runs soap all over his body before closing her eyes. She has no desire to spy on the students in the prefects’ bathroom. It is a violation. She doesn’t want it. 

She trails him, screaming curses that barely nudge a strand of hair as he lazily applies crucio to a wayward Knight of Walpurgis. She batters him as he levels his wand at his parents, cries silently as she feels the rip in his soul when he binds part of it to the ugly misshapen ring. She tries to flee every night but even this loosened leash comes with a limit. She can barely make it to the fifth floor without feeling her atoms straining to hold together. She pushes harder, spectral teeth gritting as she longs to fall into oblivion before she snaps back, clutching her head as Tom rolls over in his bed. She snarls at the realization that she must stay here, that she can never travel into that void. 

Trapped to follow in his footsteps as he graduates Hogwarts. She vainly tries to grab Dumbeldore’s attention. Fawkes tips his head, flames fluttering along his tail feathers and she squeaks at him, her voice swallowed by Riddle’s deepening laugh. She prefers it to the hollow thin one he develops later and makes no bones about informing him of that. The phoenix, however, shudders and flips his wings up and Dumbledore fails to take heed even as Fawkes flies up, hovering over her once, and then wheeling away. 

“Death doesn’t discriminate,” she informs him while lounging on the sofa as he delves deeper into the dark arts, a flat full of accumulating objects and texts as he begins his tenure at Borgin and Burkes. 

“Yes, but I do, which is why I am attempting to evade that particular sod’s embrace,” Tom replies. He presides over Death Eater meetings, maneuvering his pawns into the halls of the Ministry as he drinks Malfoy’s beloved Tokay. He flirts with pureblood wives, one hand trailing down the open back of a particularly dainty witch’s robes. She looks away but she’s still trapped in the corridor unable to stop herself from hearing the lush cries. Cries he could have easily hidden with a well cast charm. 

She thinks this must be one of the bad things that happens to witches who meddle with time. 

It’s Halloween--or Samhain, as Tom insists--that she makes her discovery. As Tom rants about Muggles destroying a beloved wizarding custom, the fading sun blazing its evening glory into the kitchen, she sighs and leans on the kitchen counter. 

And feels the edge digging into her waist. Her gasp has weight as she jerks back, curls tickling a warming cheek. Her hand flies up and she can feel her nose, her lips, her ragged sweater. She twists toward Tom, his eyes snapping with triumph, as she solidifies, the ground finally yielding to her weight. 

She falls forward and he darts, catching her. Curious hands clinically wander over her form. 

“I wondered if that would happen,” he murmurs, lips brushing wayward hair. He grabs her curls and squeezes them, eyes flush with lust. 

“You knew?” she demands as his mouth descends, bruising her with a hunger that flares between her thighs at the pressure of something real, her body acknowledged in the world, no longer unaffected. Her back meets the floor, that wretched skirt finally tugged off and cool hands drift possessively over her. She shivers and she savors the goosebumps rippling up her arms. She wants to flee, wants to see how long this freedom lasts, she wants to taste the new haunted huckleberry ice cream from Fortescue's but she also wants to feel, to be known, to have the last seven months of loneliness be driven back by the insatiable, fierce kisses that were his specialty. 

She used to feel a betrayal in every kiss and wondered who would pay her the requisite thirty pieces of silver as she greedily returned each one. Each flutter of lips, each tap with the tip of tongue, would drive images of Harry and Ron to the front of her mind. But Tom was a drug, a foolish promise of knowledge and understanding that instead dragged her under, deeper into a crevice from which she could glean no light. 

Tom surveys his greatest creation. It’s unfortunate for her that she learns too late that he is nothing more than a mewling mouth waiting to be sated, eager to devour all in his path, and that she is his favorite meal. Too late to stop as she becomes drunk on his demolishing kisses, his lingering touches skating down quivering flesh, his devotion to the wetness between her thighs. His fingers circle and stroke and he swallows every gasp as if it were his. Storing it in his memory palace where none shall visit. 

None shall know the look on Hermione’s face as he travels down her body and licks her pussy, her face twisting in loathing and desire. 

He laps her wetness, her need, her betrayal. His own peculiar potion, a concoction that has been brewing since that evening in the forest. Tom has plenty of notches in his belt, his body familiar with the press of the pureblood princesses, their breaths hitching in the supposed pinnacle of desire. Their bodies writhing as they gave themselves to their Dark Lord. The purity of the blood was more important than the purity of their bodies. He never found the rush of lust to be true and lasting. Not until her, the witch tumbling through time, her hair an untameable mess, her absolute dread and reluctance and teenage yearning crafting the most perfect little thing that he could mold and flatter and whose magic sang in harmony with his, a tonic that time made for him. 

She belonged to him. She needed to be with him his whole long life. 

But she refused a horcrux. She refused any attempts to prolong her life, arguing that it wasn’t natural, that there were other options. 

So Tom solved the problem, as he always did. Her crystalline body preserved within the forest, her ghostly form with him always, and every Samhain, a gift. All of the need that he couldn’t satiate he could now, his mouth earnestly working her flesh, his fingers slipping inside of her, the rustling of their clothes an insistent beat against her tortured gasps. 

Tom loses himself in her; in her salty sweet slick, in her airy flutters, in her hand knotting in his hair. He rubs a palm against his aching length when he feels a hard wooden point in his cheek. He looks up to see a rosy cheeked Hermoine, his pale wand in her hand, her lips trembling. He grins, tongue darting out to give a flick that provokes a shuddering inhale.

“Dangerous things, wands,” he murmurs to the creamy expanse of her thigh. 

Her lips twist into a sneer. Her eyes light with some sort of darkness that sends a shiver of delight curling in his stomach. 

“Avada Kedavra.”

But no green light shoots out. The tip of the wand sparks uselessly and she bares her teeth.

“What the hell did you do to me?” she snarls, her next words cut off by a sharp gasp. 

Tom buries himself in her thighs, sucking and nibbling her delicate pussy, and she stabs her nails in his scalp. He knifes a finger into her, barely waiting for her to relax before shoving in another finger, pads dragging along her walls in a way that curves her spine. He wandlessly whispers, “expelliarmus” and tucks his wand away as he ruthlessly pummels her. Her mouth twists, her eyes screws shut and the command is whispered between teeth dragging along her folds.

“Imperio.” He thrusts his will into her as he abandons her, the edge of her release pulsing against him. He lets the spell go long enough so that she leaps for him, nails drawing blood, a frisson of need sizzling at the base of his spine. His trousers are shucked off as he teases a pert nipple, the breasts he’s missed these long months, soft and sweet. Each scratch drives him closer to her until his body nearly melds with hers. He murmurs the spell again and she lies back, trapped in the heady world he’s built for her. 

Another spell sends shoots sprouting between tiles to wind around her wrists and lift her up, one daring vine tapping her lips as he lifts the Imperio. She is bound, she is nearly gagged, and rages pours through her and into him through the bond that each act only tightens. 

“I’ve tied us together,” he tells her breast, the vine clamping across her mouth to muffle her anger. “Your magic feeds mine which is why you can’t harm me. In theory, I can’t harm you any more than I already have. But you know how I like to test those.” 

Pearly whites sink into her delicate breast and she screams, spikes of pain leaking around the vine as blood wells up. He cocks his head before lapping at it.

“Crucio,” he breathes, groaning as she clenches around his buried fingers, her spine chittering against the floor, her limbs twitching within the vines. He strokes her clit as he eases the intensity of it, watching her writhe in pain and pleasure, removing his fingers to taste his newest creation. The jangle of her nerves sparks his own, the feedback loop intensifying as the spell can never meet its full potential. 

“Interesting,” he murmurs before sliding into her, her hips jolting against his. He moans into her hair, petting it back, gazing lovingly into her rage filled eyes. “What I feel is tied in with yours on Samhain eve. We are forever connected, Hermione. You refused the Horcrux. This is my gift to you.” 

He moves then, slipping in and out of her, reveling in the rush as she rolls against him, their desire beating at each other, panicked need to tip over the edge, the hate and lust rushing through them both. He is unrelenting, his thumb circling her clit until she cries out. Her climax overwhelms him and he quickly follows until he is panting into her. 

“I doubt we need the charm,” he tells her with his peppered kisses before she shoves him off.

“I hate you,” she tells him. 

The vines slither back into the floor, the tiles smooth over, and he sinks into the magic that is rising off of her. The spell has worked. She is bound to him and the tighter it becomes, the more his magic grows. A neat twist on a vampiric feeding. His own sweet temptation, tethered to him forever, ensuring the madness she knew in her world never comes to pass.

“At least you could heal me,” she pouts and with a lazy episkey he removes the blood from her breast. But he keeps the teeth marks, a new purple tattoo. A visible mark that she is his. He knows she won’t take the Dark Mark. This will be his personal one, he thinks, even as his need for her begins to rise again. 

Hermione slants a look at him beneath her lashes before leaping up and racing for the door. She can taste the fresh air–-she’ll find clothes later, she doesn’t care. She doesn’t care if it’s only for one night--it’s enough to be away from him. But her foot falters on the landing and she collapses to her knees. She screams and pounds the floor as his mocking laughter haunts her. 

“This is your only taste of humanity,” he informs her, rising to his feet, long lithe muscles, shoulders broad from his meals at Hogwarts, continued by his patronage with the Sacred Twenty Eight. Sweat slicked curls stick to his head and she absolutely loathes how delectable he looks. A tempting trap designed to ensnare. Fate’s own little siren. 

“But don’t worry, darling. I brought home a pint of ice cream.”

And so Hermione spends Samhain being spoon fed the newest flavors of ice cream, sucking on a sugar quill, enjoying a cup of coffee, and being slammed against the wall, Tom’s cock steadily thrusting, pitching her higher. She threw away any qualms she has, allowing herself to sigh and gasp and mewl as he spreads her legs wider. She splashes in the tub and he slides behind her, guiding the sponge along her skin, before diving clever fingers between her legs. 

“You’re mine,” he nips her earlobe as she pants his name. 

Dawn finds him flat on the bed, her riding him with movements languorous and smooth. His eyes are shut, his head tilted back and she swipes a knife across his throat. He chuckles as the blade grows dull once it passes over him.

“No real harm to one another,” he reminds her before flicking a lazy finger against her clit. The room grows rosy in the light and sweat trickles down her spine and Hermione clamps her eyes shut, tears threatening to spill, wondering what she did wrong to deserve this fate, even as her release coaxes soft sobs from her. 

The sun peeks over the horizon and she finds herself incorporeal, the damned Hogwarts skirt half hitched and Tom fast asleep. 

She wishes she could weep. 

**Author's Note:**

> I rarely write in the present tense but this is my 2nd time doing it, just to play with it. There's probably a few mixed tenses in there that I did not catch and apologies.


End file.
